I think Hershey’s is more of a hold over from a bygone time. Few people eat it as is anymore. They market themselves as the chocolate for s’mores or some different flavors
More like a baking chocolate now than anything where you’re not supposed to eat it as is. The Kisses are often used for a baking treat I forget the name of. A cookie with just one of them jammed into the top
Peanut butter kisses is what I’ve called them. A peanut butter cookie with a Hershey kiss smooshed into it while it’s still warm from the oven. I’ve had some where they did a sugar cookie instead of a peanut butter cookie, but the peanut butter ones are way better in my opinion.
Ya that’s it. Partially why I call it a baking chocolate. Tastes weird as is but any alteration via cooking really brings it out
I have a big ass bag of Hersey’s baking chocolate minis I bought years ago. I’ll occasionally snack on it to get a little chocolate boost and it tastes bad enough that I don’t feel like eating a whole ass bowl of them. I made some baked oats like a week ago and tossed them on top last second. Added a very nice bit to it and took an otherwise ok but basic baked good an elevated it with bittersweet chocolate
I do that to my oatmeal on occasion. Tried in cold milk cereal but kind of tastes gross. Feel like a better higher quality baking chocolate might be nicer
I mean, that's basically wine in a nutshell. First try is just an extremely bitter and nauseating taste but it supposedly gets better as you get used to it.
Beer too. I still can't drink more than a few sips though.
Actually most hard alcohol is also rough, but that's less of a taste thing because you can barely taste anything over the burn.
There is no need for /s. By definition there is no such thing as a bad spice. All tastes are acquired by the food you were raised on and tried. It's like saying there is objectively bad art, every flavor, tone, sight and experience suits a different audience, some are widely and easily loved others suit a more niche audience. As long as anyone in the world likes the taste of 1,000 year egg, durian or monkey brains (though popular in Cantonese cuisine) it's simply not a flavor you enjoy. There are many plants that specifically evolved an unpalatable painful and dangerous toxin known as capsaicin to avoid being eaten and humans cultivate them for mass consumption.
tbh I think it tastes more like chalk, and I say this as someone who grew up eating them. Once I tasted european chocolate though, it was over. I could never eat hersheys again.
I don't like European chocolate lol but I'm not big on chocolate anyway. I like the Hershey's nuggets with almonds or peanuts, and find most chocolates too fatty.
Hershey's is weird. It's not good, but I find myself easily nomming down an entire bar. Give me some high quality chocolate and I'll savor the flavor of a square or two and just be satisfied.
So, Milka is owned by Mondelez, an American company.
As for why Hershey's chocolate tastes like vomit, it's how they process their milk. Basically the way they heat it causes it to form butyric acid, which is also something your body produces when you're about to vomit. Generations of Americans just sort of accepting this has kind of made a lot of people enjoy the taste of a Hershey bar. But yeah, it's got that back of the throat burn for me and I hate it.
As far as American chocolate brands go, try Tony's Chocolonely (edit: they’re Dutch but screw it’s I like their product anyway) or Chocolove. Tony's just released a new bar that's ganache filled that's absolutely stellar. They also actively combat slavery which is a real problem in the chocolate industry.
Wait you’re telling me not all chocolate gives you the back of the throat burn?! What??? I have been bothered by that my entire life and just accepted that all milk chocolate tastes that way. So i started eating dark chocolate instead
This is wild. I’ve never heard another soul mention feeling the throat burn thing. I really thought I was just a weirdo who was sensitive to chocolate. Tho I’m pretty sure I experience it even when I’ve tried non-Hershey’s chocolate…. But my boyfriend recently brought me some “chocolate hedgehogs” from Canada and I did notice that it didn’t burn.
Yep, generally american chocolate follows the hershey formula, if you get european chocolate (i.e. tony's) you'll notice a massive difference. I've never been able to eat american milk chocolate, but dark and white chocolate is fine for me, and european milk chocolate is amazing.
I’ll join you in your astonishment, until now I hadn’t made that connection, even though I’ve had some of the imported chocolate from Trader Joe’s and didn’t have that feeling. Weird.
All good. They are sold all over in American stores so I understand the thought. They are an incredibly moral company though which is why it's a bit pricey
I’m an ex-chocolatier. More specifically, I know how to temper chocolate and dip strawberries courtesy of a now defunct retailer. However, I did love it so much I considered making a career out of it. But the supply chain is just disgusting with the sheer volume of human rights abuses in it.
I live in the US, but tried Tony's for the first time in the Netherlands. It's still my favorite. Leonidas from Belgium is a close second. Lindor a very close third.
Yo Tony's is fire. I just don't like the uneven separation of sections in the bar, makes it kinda messy. But it tastes awesome. In Canada they import it from Belgium though for some reason. I didn't know the company was american.
The "back of the throat burn" is so relatable and everyone made me think I was crazy since I was a kid for not liking it. I do like their cookies and cream bars tho.
I remember hearing about the vomit several years ago and it never got me away from Hershey's because I loved it! But then one day, all of a sudden I just could not eat Hershey's anymore. I now eat Dove.
Please correct me if im wrong but I swear I saw that Tony's changed their manyfacturing after being bought out and and now while they still publicly denounce slavery in chocolate manufacturing they are now using the same means of aquiring chocolate as the major offenders
It's also war time chocolate. Same reason Chef Boyardee is nasty canned stuff. The US military wanted people to make as much cheap shelf stable foods that didn't necessarily require heating and Hershey's was one of the companies that said cool beans let's do it, because chocolate is a luxury anyway and it's not the first thing people go for when choosing food rations so they were gonna lose money on the war anyway if they didn't
It's called mere-exposure effect or familiarity principle.
It's not only about food taste, it's about everything taste. People think that Mona Lisa is something special because of it, for example.
Pretty aure they've done studies, and very little kids from UK don't get the vomit taste from Hershey's chocolate. So it seems to be more exposure to vomit that makes Hershey's taste bad than exposure to Hershey's makes it taste good.
Interesting idea. Maybe if you grow up with Hershey's, it doesn't bother you
Until you get used to higher quality chocolate that is. Hershey's doesn't taste like vomit to me, but it's definitely not something I go out of my way to get unlike the good stuff at like, Trader Joe's
Probably not. Hershey’s is just cheap on the ingredients, so it doesn’t taste very good. But people latched onto the butyric acid explanation because butyric acid is in vomit. Even though the taste of vomit isn’t created by butyric acid, not alone.
And Hershey’s hate is a more recent phenomenon, caused by declining quality over the years. Butyric acid’s been part of the recipe from the beginning, ever since Hershey first tried reverse engineering Swiss milk chocolate.
I wonder if anybody would even equate the taste of Hershey’s to vomit without the influence of the internet. I agree it tastes bad, but nothing like vomit
I agree, though it could possibly be explained if there was an issue with the dosing across batches or if some people are really sensitive to butyrate compounds etc etc
I thought it tasted like vomit the first time I tried it, which was before the Internet was a thing. The very first time I went to the US we had quite a lot of food that was good but the chocolate was awful.
From NZ, so we have Whittakers here (which is really good), although we didn't have that when I was kid.
I tasted it long before I read anything about it on the internet and it did taste like vomit to me. I had no idea that it was possible to make chocolate taste so wrong.
You had a different expectation for its taste, your body triggered a defensive reaction to an unexpected stimulus. This is very common and applies to everything from taste to visual stimulus to auditory stimulus. It's why we enjoy musical scales because your brain is rewarding you for accurately predicting the next sounds to why it is extremely common for people to hate how they look in photography when they are used to seeing themselves reversed in mirrors. It's why musical preferences are generational and normally lock in around teenager years. Your brain is always rewarding and punishing you invisibly based on expectations which by design, are subconscious.
Your experience certainly isn't wrong, but it also is always subjective to the individual.
UK person here, it does in fact taste like vomit. It isn't overwhelming, and I can see how you could become habituated to the taste to the point that you don't notice, but absent that it's very distinctive thing. And smell/taste memory tends to be very reliable so... Yuk...
I have never tasted the same thing in other dairy products, but much more habituated to eating those.
I think it's just out of the ordinary and that makes it stand out more. If you're used to something having a balance of three different flavors no matter where you get it, but one place also adds a fourt flavor, that fourth flavor will really stand out. You haven't normalized it yet. It's like eating chips and one bag of chips is like flavored. The lime will stand out compared to every other bag of chips because you haven't normalized it.
It’s found in butter that isn’t rancid. It’s an important part of butter fat that gives it that buttery taste. When butter goes rancid the acid separates from the fat, which does contribute to the bad smell of rancid butter. But not the bad taste of rancid butter. Apparently, on its own, in spite of the smell, it still tastes buttery. Which I guess is why it’s used as a flavoring in a lot of foods.
I’ll admit I didn’t know most of this when I left my first comment, I just wanted to look into what you said about rancid butter and thought the information was interesting
Something clearly is, though, and this butylic acid related process is the main difference between it and other types of chocolate. There must be something in the processing which is causing it to taste like vomit, and the answer can't be 'it doesn't taste like vomit' or 'people are imagining that it tastes like vomit' because it literally does taste like vomit to many people and I know that in my case it has nothing to do with preconceptions because I had no idea that chocolate like that even existed when I tried it, so I haven't any reason to doubt other people are the same about it.
Milka is shit now and fell from one of Germanys favourite brands to one of the most disliked. Why? Enshitification. Worse formular, worse packaging, less content.
What upsets me is that the americans bought Cadbury, the most famous British chocolate brand and immediately ruined it by changing the formula to be cheaper.
The worst part is that their strategy is working, their hold on the UK market took a hit but they expanded aggressively into the rest of the EU and other foreign markets (places that never tried it when it was good) and are now making more money than ever.
Pro tip, if it says Dairy Milk on the wrapper then it still tastes good. Their buyout was conditional that they don't change the Dairy Milk recipe, so instead they just started making more and more Cadbury's products not use Dairy Milk.
If it doesn't say it's Dairy Milk on the wrapper then it will be the cheap crap.
I think it's changed now. I had a fruit and nut dairy milk bar recently and it has the vomit flavor. It's one of the very few chocolates I occasionally crave. I'm sad. I'll find something else or I'll have to source it from Europe.
Welcome to the true American experience. Everything you once loved will be bought by a larger company, exported to cheaper(read slave labor) production, with inferior substiture ingredients until it no longer resembles the thing you previously knew.
Butyric acid is present in American chocolate and not so much in European.
If you can’t stand Hershey’s specifically, this is probably why. Some people have a height edges sensitivity to butyric acid. And it makes American chocolate inedible.
It's apparently majority-owned by a Belgian investment firm, but it is founded and headquartered in the Netherlands. Not sure about the production process but I suppose Belgium is a big chocolate country so it would make sense.
even americans know hershey is among the worst of the worst chocolate. and this will be hard to believe, but it's not the only brand available either. in fact, milka is even sold in the USA!
Don't you know. America only has American food and we're completely ignorant of all non-american food. I hear this all the time on the Internet. So, it must be true.
Actually, you can blame that on the founder. He was trying to copy the heavily guarded milk chocolate making process from Europe by using food scientists. The guy who managed to make him a chocolate bar was like "oops, I messed up and soured the milk, but that is easily fixable" and the founder decided that the sour taste would make the chocolate bar stand out in the market. As if undercutting the imported chocolate price by a huge amount wouldn't.
This is all horse shit. Hershey was solving a different problem, they had more challenging logistics when trying to keep dairy fresh. Hershey needed a more stable form of milk and a byproduct of that process was butyric acid.
That's not what happened. Chocolate was a drink for basically all of humanity and you drank it a lot like coffee which included putting milk into it.
Then in the 1800s people started to experiment with making solid chocolate out of cocoa butter. But you still need to put milk in because without it chocolate tastes awful. But the problem was that milk spoils so you couldn't make it shelf stable. But then people tried making it with powdered milk which worked well enough. Then Nestle came up with the idea to use condensed milk which worked even better and started selling the first mass produced, commercial chocolates (it was actually Nestle's neighbor that made the chocolates and Nestle just provided the milk, but that's not super important to this particular conversation). Then Hershey was trying to find a cheaper way to make shelf stable chocolate, and one of his workers came up with the idea to cook it low and slow for a long time, which broke down the fat and worked for exactly what Hershey was going for. Which also produced Butyric acid which gave the chocolate a tangy flavor, but it also gave a much snappier texture which is something that people generally like in a chocolate bar.
Triolade is my favorite Milka bar. It's a giant bar with milk, white, and dark chocolate. I used to eat it often when I lived in Austria. Unfortunately, they don't have it in the international shops in my area. But when I have a hankering, I can always grab Kuhflecken (cow spots) which is milk chocolate with "spots" of white chocolate, from a local store. Way better than the cheap chocolate we have in the US.
we do have milka in the US, but you should try some smaller brands and see how they compare. i used to live in pennsylvania and they had two small local chocolate companies that i thought were really good: sarris, and betsy ann.
Buddy of mine is a former Rugby player for the Salford Devils and had some of these delivered to him.
Funny story: We hung out a bar in SFLA. He would share these with the waitresses and bartenders. They became raccoons digging through trash, coming around to get some chocolates. It was hilarious to see them gather around because they were so good. I really liked these.
The process Hershey uses to make milk chocolate sours the milk. You just happen to be very sensitive to the taste of sour milk which is why it tastes like vomit.
Not that Hershey needs a reason to taste like vomit.
Butyric Acid. it mimics to some degree/speeds up the aging process of the chocolate that Hersheys/American companies couldn't keep up with. it has the downside of also making the chocolate taste like vomit but its cheap, so they keep doing it that way.
Hershey tried to reinvent Milk Chocolate without the secret Swiss recipe. Hershey’s imposter process par-soured the milk during preparation causing butyric acid to form; the same chemical that gives stomach acid its distinctness.
I had a teacher in high school that used to work at a Hershey factory. He told us a story about a coworker who came in hung over. At one point, the coworker leaned over the railing and vomited into the large mixing vat. The mixing arm turned one time and the vomit disappeared into the chocolate. No one said anything because they would have to stop the machines to clean it out and that employee would have definitely been fired.
Almost certainly untrue, having worked there and in other food manufacturers in central PA. Cameras observed over production 24\7. Leadership eyes everywhere. Quality personel monitoring and testing throughout every batch. Plus there are better stories that are actually true. Like employees falling into the vats to their deaths. Body fluid spill is treated like a national emergency but still unlikely to get fired over it. Batches are discarded for a ton of reasons every day.
Milka is great, you can find them in in some American stores or almost in any outside of American stores. At least in my state they are in almost any Asian, middle eastern, European grocery stores.
Also, if you find a lindt store, they sell chocolate that is not wrapped. They are awesome. I recommend them a lot.
I've had Milka. It's definitely better, but not so much better than Hershey's that I'm like "oh my God".
Fucking love the Milka Lu's though with that cracker in them.
There are numerous American chocolate brands that don't contain butyric acid. Americans have always had access to good chocolate. They prefer the vomit/Parmesan taste due to be raised on it.
White chocolate cookies and cream heresies is fine but the default chocolate sick flavour is yucky. Cadbury dairy milk forever!!! (They went and changed the recipe of that so its rubbish as well -_-)
They taste better melted, I swear! M&Ms too! Which is a problem because they designed to be less melty than the average chocolate bar without being properly tempered
tbh even the choclate from aldis own brand is better than milka, since they changed the recipie a few years ago. now it's basicly overpriced trash. only exception is maybe the dark milk line.
I heard it started as a war rations issue. Chocolate is a really good, simple war meal, and it was given a bitter taste to discourage over-eating. Then people came back from the war and found that chocolate tasted different to how they remembered in the war, so Hershey's started putting the bitter chemicals back in and it just stuck.
As someone who actually appreciates quality chocolate, I still love a Hershey bar with almonds in it once in awhile lol. It's kind of its own thing though, kind of like how white chocolate doesn't even have actual cocoa just cocoa butter, but still hits in moderation.
As an American, I am so glad that it's now very easy for me to buy at least some kinds of European chocolates that taste better than shit American chocolate.
You need to actually look up different chocolate brands from America. There are tons that taste just as good, if not better, than anything Europe can produce.
Just because y'all hyperfixate on a massive capitalist crap hole company doesn't mean we have bad chocolate or bad taste lmao
2.2k
u/shave_your_eyebrows Shave Your Eyebrows 7h ago
Erm I actually DO know why it tastes like vomit, Hershey puts vomit chemical in their stupid chocolate that I hate for no reason
You Americans need to eat Milka or somethin